146 Helping Your Child with Language-Based Learning Disabilities
Leveraging these key ingredients when helping your child study and memorize information can make studying more productive.
You can promote your child’s autonomy by letting him or her choose the approach used to remember material. You can encourage your child’s sense of purpose by helping him or her appreciate why it’s important to remember the material. Help your child recognize the many ways he or she will benefit from making an effort to study and learn; if good grades incentivize your child, remind him or her how the extra effort can result in an improved grade. You can promote your child’s sense of mastery by working together in a proactive way, using the study tips throughout this book.
Strategies to Help Your Child Process
Information Processing and Memory 147
your child to say, “The Bill of Rights is the first ten amendments in the Constitution.” If your child struggles to accurately recall the information correctly, be sure to immediately provide clarification and then restate your question.
Begin and end homework with the most important points. We tend to remember the first and last things we experience. For example, it’s often easy to remember arriving at a destination and leaving a destina-tion, but events in the middle are sometimes more difficult to recall. As a parent, you can leverage this phenomenon when helping your child study for a test by beginning and ending your study session with the most important concepts.
Infuse content with emotion. All people process and remember infor-mation better if they have an emotional connection to it. Your child is more likely to remember important details about what he or she is learn-ing if he or she feels strongly about the material. For example, if you are helping your child learn something about Colonial America, you might want to relay an anecdote about an especially heroic person or some great tragedy that occurred during this time. The emotion that these stories evoke will promote the memory of all the related content.
Make content relevant. Relevance is relative, especially for children.
The important things your child needs to learn will only seem relevant to him or her if they seem relevant to you. As a parent, find a genuine interest in the content you are trying to teach your child. The topic of photosynthesis might not be entirely exciting to you, but if you can find some excitement in it, it will help your child. Your excitement will become your child’s excitement, and he or she will be better able to learn about photosynthesis.
Connect the new with the old. Help your child make an association between what he or she already knows and the new information you are teaching. This will improve your child’s ability to remember the mate-rial. One way to do this is to connect new information to a familiar image, helping your child visualize what you are teaching. For example, use the familiar image of a bicycle wheel to help your child “see” the stages of the water cycle. You can also connect new information to a
148 Helping Your Child with Language-Based Learning Disabilities
familiar word. Your child probably knows that the word “ignite” means to catch fire. Help him or her connect the word “ignite” to the word
“igneous” when learning about the class of rocks formed from lava. Word associations like this are enormously helpful.
Take complexity into account. When explaining concepts to your child, only go into the degree of complexity you feel your child is capable of understanding, and eliminate extraneous information. For example, it’s possible your child does not need to understand how atoms combine to make molecules to know that photosynthesis is how plants produce food for themselves. Stick to the learning objective, and keep the infor-mation streamlined.
Match the study location to what is being studied. Our capacity for memory grew out of our need to navigate the physical world: in order to find food, water, shelter, and friends, we needed to be able to navigate the environment. We can leverage this natural capacity to remember details in our environment by connecting what we are learning with physical reference points. For example, if you are helping your child prepare for an anatomy exam covering the digestive system, you might want to study in your kitchen; you can more easily connect how things in that room, such as food and cookware, correspond to aspects of the digestive system. You could relate structural components of your house, such as beams and walls, to the skeletal system.
Check to make sure your child fully understands a concept. Children frequently overestimate how well they know something. In order for a child to remember something, he or she needs to understand what it means. That is why it is critical to check the depth of your child’s under-standing by asking him or her to provide you with detailed explanations based on the assignment. For example, if your child has an upcoming quiz on photosynthesis, he or she might feel that simply knowing that photosynthesis is how plants make the food they need for growing is suf-ficient. You, however, might be aware that for your child to receive full credit on the quiz, he or she will need to know that photosynthesis is a process by which plants use sunlight to combine carbon dioxide with water to produce glucose and oxygen.
Information Processing and Memory 149
Creatively break down difficult words and concepts. Sometimes it can be helpful to take an important word or concept and create playful variations of the term to promote your child’s memory of it. For example, you can draw a thermos with the word “hot” on it and water squirting out of the top as a means of helping your child remember that a hydro-thermal vent spews superheated water. This approach allows your child to use visual cues to remember the meaning of a word.
Try exaggerated pronunciation. Exaggerated mouth movements and pronunciation enhance memory. This approach is especially good for learning to spell certain words. The word “schedule,” for example, can be challenging to spell. Pronouncing it as “skeh- du- lee” makes the spelling easier to remember.
Use exaggerated intonation. Try to change the emphasis you put on words when presenting concepts to your child. If you are describing the water cycle, for example, you might say, “The hot sun evaporates the water, which rises and then cools to form clouds that produce rain, which falls back down to the Earth.” You could emphasize the word “hot” so it sounds hot. You might say “rises” with a rising intonation, and you might say the word “cools” in a lower, deeper voice, perhaps shivering just a bit.
Incorporate song, rhythm, and melody. Some children are especially good at remembering information if they can put it into a song or melody.
A colleague of mine helped her third- grade students learn about adapta-tion with a catchy song: “Adaptaadapta-tion, adaptaadapta-tion, changes in the body to fit a location.”
Use mnemonics, acronyms, and acrostics. A mnemonic is a pattern of letters, ideas, or associations that facilitates memory. Children are immensely creative and enjoy coming up with mnemonics. The acronym
“HOMES” is a great mnemonic for remembering the names of the Great Lakes: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior. An acrostic is a poem, word puzzle, or other composition in which certain letters in each line form a word or words. An especially creative student of mine came up with the following sentence: “He never ate Kellogg’s except when he ran.” This helped him remember the noble gases in the order they appear
150 Helping Your Child with Language-Based Learning Disabilities
on the periodic table: He (Helium) Never (Neon) Ate (Argon) Kellogg’s (Krypton) eXcept (Xenon) when he Ran (Radon).”
Use diagrams. Diagrams are a great way to process and understand important concepts. For example, to help your child learn the three branches of the U.S. government, create a large poster containing a tree with three main branches. One branch would be the executive branch;
make a big “X” to help your child remember “executive” and then you might turn the “X” into a figure that represents the president. For the judicial branch, you can make nine stick figures and write the name of a Supreme Court justice your child learned about while studying with you.
(I once worked with an eighth- grader who was delighted to learn about Sandra Day O’Connor, who was not only female but also loved to ride horses, just as my student did. Creating this special connection helped my student better remember the judicial branch.) Have your child write an email to his or her senator or congressperson. This process, especially if he or she gets a reply, will create a strong connection between your child and these individuals, thereby strengthening his or her memory of the legislative branch.
Create timelines. Timelines leverage our brain’s natural tendency to remember things in sequence. This is what allows us to remember the letters of the alphabet and consecutive numbers. Most people remember events best when they can conjure up a visual recreation of what occurred. Create a long timeline with very simple pictographs and illus-trations to help your child visualize the people, events, locations, and other important details that occurred in a story or during an important historical event.
Utilize passive exposure to material. Even familiarizing your child with information in informal ways, such as on a wall poster, increases memory and retention. Identify key words, ideas, and other content your child needs to commit to memory. As a test or quiz approaches, cover the walls of your child’s study area with this information. This passive exposure to information will help with memory.
Leverage multiple senses. Sometimes, utilizing as many senses as pos-sible can promote memory. For instance, it is often easy to remember
Information Processing and Memory 151
that you have locked your car door when you have the experience of pressing the locking device, watching the lock go down, and hearing the sound your car makes when it locks. The combination of touch, sight, and sound enhances your memory of what occurred. Utilize this knowl-edge when helping your child remember academic material. For example, while describing plate tectonics, explain the phenomenon, show your child illustrations and videos depicting it, and have him or her physically tear a piece of paper in half and push the two pieces together to repre-sent converging plates. The more your child can physically manipulate objects with his or her hands, the more likely he or she will remember the topic.
Study while walking with your child. Because physical movement pro-motes memory, sometimes it is helpful to study while moving. Take a walk somewhere peaceful with your child and discuss material that he or she is trying to learn. Avoid movement that requires a great deal of attention, such as one- on- one basketball, because it will be virtually impossible to stay focused on the study material. Simply dribbling a bas-ketball or practicing free throws, however, might work well. Use your own good judgment about what activity will work best for your child.
Avoid sense competition. Vision and sound can compete with one another. Some children with language- based learning disabilities process and remember information better if they can close their eyes while lis-tening to you read. In fact, if you are reading aloud an especially impor-tant section from a textbook, encourage your child to close his or her eyes and focus on the words you are saying.
Study Strategies That Promote Memory
You can help your child develop good study habits that also promote infor-mation retention. Visit this book’s website, http://www.newharbinger .com/40989, for additional tips on helping your child process, retain, and recall information.
152 Helping Your Child with Language-Based Learning Disabilities